Thanks for the kudos. I actually started out with Geo::Coder::US, which is very good, especially for the price ;)
But it wasn't quite good enough. For example, a search for "69 prince st boston, ma" should return two matches, one in Boston, and one in JP, but neither GCU (or rather the TIGER data I'd guess) nor Eagle, know the difference between Boston and JP. Instead, they both return two "Boston" matches. This is fine for many purposes, but my clients wanted something better. This may not work for bulk geocoding, but for bulk geocoding you probably wouldn't care about such a fine grain of detail. Of course, given Google's volume of traffic, how many addresses/second would you have to be doing for them to notice ;) Of course, until Google Maps is officially released, and until the get more specific about their TOS, this is all just having fun. On 6/16/05, Ricker, William <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Joel, > > Neat demo of Google MAPS API! And wicked elegant, pulling the hidden XML > reply packet out for data. I like it. For occasional use, this is > awesome. > > For serious bulk geocoding (anything beyond Eagle's free 50 samples, > anything worth automating), using Google is both overkill and way too > chatty on the network. A local Geo::Coder::US TIGER/DB would handle bulk > geocoding all in-house. And I suspect the GoogleMaps API terms of > service will crack down on excessive commercial use ... and unclear if > Google Maps will be updating their Geocoding data with exception reports > as assiduously as the commercial providers are. > > http://geocoder.us/ is available both online and offline, free*, using > Geo::Coder::US and TIGER/Line DB. > > * The Geocoder.US WebService and on-line data is under a > **NonCommercial-ShareAlike** license, so not considered Free Software > under the Debian definition, not useable for business/commercial > purposes w/o paying. (But their prices are a bargain for commercial use > compared to the competition.) The > http://search.cpan.org/~sderle/Geo-Coder-US/ module however has the Perl > license, specified as 5.8.3 or later. And the data is USGovt Copyright, > which is both Free and Libre as well. So if you download the data and > PMs and build your own DB, it's apparently FLOSS usable commercially ... > even under the Debian definition ... w/o need for webservice connection. > Which is a win if you have enough of it to do, and don't need to pay > someone to update the database with corrections. > > I make extensive use of geocoder.us in cleaning the data for my (very > non-commercial) Perl+PHP+MySQL mapping project at > http://ema.arrl.org/fd/fd_dir.php (which charts the sites you can see > Ham Radio in action in Easter Mass in a little over a week, June 25-26, > Field Day weekend). > > > Cheers, > > Bill Ricker > Not speaking for The Firm > aka N1VUX > > _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
